Tag Archives: Mexican

Chicken Pozole with Green Chile

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Pozole is a Mexican stew that has a base of hominy. You can find versions with chicken and pork and they can either be green or red. When you’re searching for it online, a lot of the recipes use the Americanized word Posole.

This recipe originated on the side of a big can of hominy that we found at Sam’s Club. It was the Juanita’s Foods Mexican Style Hominy in a 110 oz can. We had never made this before and thought it sounded fun. The recipe on the can started with a fresh whole chicken and includes instructions on cooking the chicken. We happened to be out of town so we opted to use a rotisserie chicken. This was a great time saver. You could also use a smoked chicken, grilled chicken breast or poached chicken. To be honest, I’m not a fan of poached chicken because it doesn’t matter how many ingredients you add to the water, the chicken always tastes bland to me.

There are very many variations to this recipe that you can find online. Some call for pulled pork and some are “red” instead of green. There are also many different garnishes that you can use. We used the lime wedges and radishes, which seem to be the most popular.

This dish is typically served as a stew so you can add more chicken stock if you want it more soup like. You can also cook it down a little and make it thicker if you want to serve it with tortillas and eat it like a taco.

This serves about 7 to 8 people.

Ingredients

  • 1/2 of a rotisserie chicken, or 1 1/2 to 2 pounds of cooked chicken, cut into pieces
  • 55 oz of Juanita’s Mexican Style Hominy (1/2 of the large 110 oz can)
  • 1 tablespoons of olive oil
  • 1 large onion, chopped
  • 4 cloves of garlic, chopped
  • 1 tablespoon salt
  • 4 poblano peppers
  • 1 jalapeno pepper
  • 6 tomatillos (you can also use canned if fresh aren’t available)
  • 1 tablespoon dried oregano
  • 1 tablespoon ground corriander
  • 1/2 tablespoon ground cumin
  • 4 cups of chicken broth
  • Optional garnishes: lime wedges, sliced radishes, chopped cilantro, diced onion, shredded cabbage, and/or dried oregano. (we used lime wedges and radishes).

Directions

  1. Prepare the poblano and jalapeno peppers by roasting them over a flame until blistered and blackened. You can roast these on the stove top of a gas stove or on your grill. If neither are available, then you can roast them under the broiler with the tomatillos (see next step). Then put them in a plastic bag to cool. When they are cool enough to handle, gently pull the blackened skin away, then seed the peppers and chop the peppers.
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  2. Prepare the tomatillos by removing the husks. Then roast them on the grill or under the broiler to give them a nice char. This should take about 5 minutes. Let the tomatillos cool, then chop them into small pieces. If you’re using canned tomatillos, you can skip the roasting step and just chop them up.
  3. Heat the olive oil in a large pan or dutch oven, then saute the chopped onion and garlic for 10 minutes.
  4. Add the poblanos, jalapeno, and tomatillos to the pan and continue to saute until all items are soft.
  5. Transfer the sauteed vegetables to a blinder and puree until smooth.
  6. Remove the skin from the chicken and, using a fork, shred the chicken. Discard the bones (or set them aside for making a stock later).
  7. Add the hominy, pureed pepper mixture, shredded chicken, and 4 cups of chicken stock to the large pan or dutch oven. Mix well.
  8. Cover the pot and cook on medium heat for 20 minutes. Salt to taste.
  9. Serve with your choice of garnish: lime wedges, sliced radishes, chopped cilantro, diced onion, shredded cabbage, and/or dried oregano.

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Smoked Jalapeño Sauce

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This sauce came about because we wanted to find a way to use some fajita ingredients with pasta. A really good friend gave us a huge basket of jalapeño peppers from her garden and we used these in the smoker. We’ve been making a Doña sauce for years and this is a variation of the Smoked Doña Sauce. The primary difference is the sauce we made tonight wasn’t intended to be used like a salsa, it’s more a base for something else. It’s definitely much spicier and intense than the doña sauces.

Smoked Jalapeno Sauce being mixed in the blender.

Smoked Jalapeno Sauce being mixed in the blender.

Ingredients

  • 1 lb of fresh red ripened jalapeños,
  • 6 cloves of garlic,
  • 1/4 cup evoo.
  • 2 cups water
  • 1 teaspoon kosher salt

Instructions

  1. Smoke the jalapeño peppers (See smoking instructions here)
  2. Blanch the peppers and garlic in 2 cups of water for 20 mins
  3. Put everything in a blender and process until smooth, adding a teaspoon of kosher salt.

Makes a spectacular dipping sauce and base for a pasta dish! We mixed it tomato sauce then added it to pasta, fajita beef and grilled vegetables – it’s definitely worth a try!

Here are some pictures of the process:

Jalapenos being put into the smoker.

Jalapenos being put into the smoker.

Jalapenos after they have been smoked.

Jalapenos after they have been smoked.

 

Fajita pasta with smoked jalapeno sauce.

Fajita pasta with smoked jalapeno sauce.

Smoked Jalapeno Sauce being mixed in the blender.

Smoked Jalapeno Sauce being mixed in the blender.

Roasted Tomatillo Sauce

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This recipe is a variation of the Tomatillo Green Sauce that I posted a few years ago. In this one, you don’t need a grill and you still get a great sauce. For our broth, we used a home-made broth that we made with the bones from a smoked turkey. I love the smokey flavor that comes from a broth like this. You can use whatever broth you want. The peppers we used are all from the last harvest from our plants that we picked just before our first freeze. A lot of the peppers were pretty small so we wanted to use them up before they go bad.

Roasted Tomatillo Sauce

Our Roasted Tomatillo Sauce

Ingredients

  • 1 pound tomatillos, husks removed and cut in half
  • 3 to 5 cloves of garlic
  • 4 jalapeno peppers
  • 2 small (or 1 large) green bell peppers
  • 2 poblano peppers
  • 1 large yellow onion, cut into quarters
  • Kosher salt and fresh ground black pepper, to taste
  • Extra-virgin olive oil, for drizzling
  • 1 bunch of fresh cilantro, leaves only
  • 1 cup of chicken or turkey broth
  • Zest and juice of 2 lime

Directions

Preheat your oven to 400 degrees F.

Remove the seeds from the poblano peppers and bell peppers. Also, since the seeds and inner membrane contain the heat, remove the seeds from some of the jalapeno peppers. We leave the seeds in 2 of the jalapeno peppers to keep some heat in the final sauce.

I will note that we cooked our peppers first and this made removing the seeds harder. The peppers get slimy and the seeds stick to the cooked peppers so make it easier on yourself and remove the seeds before cooking.

Roasted jalapeno, poblano and bell peppers

Roasted jalapeno, poblano and bell peppers. As you can see, we are in the process of removing the seeds from the roasted peppers. It would have been much easier to remove them before we roasted them.

Once you’ve taken the seeds out of the peppers, put the tomatillos, garlic, jalapeno peppers, bell peppers, poblano peppers and onion into a large bowl. Drizzle with olive oil and sprinkle them with salt and pepper. We put about a teaspoon of both salt and pepper.

Prepare your baking sheet by putting a layer of foil on it and giving the foil a light coating of olive oil. With all the vegetables coated with the olive oil, salt and pepper, spread them onto your baking sheet in an even layer. Take care to make sure the cut halves of the tomatillos are facing up. This will keep all (or most) of the juices from the tomatillos from spilling out.

Tomatillos, jalapenos, poblanos, bell peppers, onions and garlic before being roasted.

This is our baking sheet with all the vegetables spread out before we put them in the oven to roast. Notice that the cut sides of the tomatillos are facing up. This keeps the juices from spilling out and making a mess.

Place the baking sheet in the center of your oven and roast until the vegetables are soft. This will probably take at least 20 minutes but might be longer. Ours took about 30 minutes until the tomatillos were soft.

Once roasted, put the vegetables into a large pot or dutch oven. Add the cilantro, lime juice, lime zest and broth. Simmer over medium-low heat for 10 minutes.

Tomatillos, onions, garlic and cilantro in our dutch oven.

Here are the tomatillos, onions, garlic and cilantro in our dutch oven. At the time, we were getting the seeds out of the peppers.

Now, use your immersion blender to turn this into a sauce. You can use a food processor or blender if you don’t have an immersion blender.

The immersion blender while making the tomatillo sauce.

Here is sauce while we were using the immersion blender. I hope you can tell it’s pretty liquefied with just a little amount of chunks.

Once it is cooled, you’ll have a great sauce for chips or using as a base in Mexican dish. We’ll be mixing ours with grilled pork for a pork stew.

Roasted Tomatillo Sauce

Our Roasted Tomatillo Sauce

You can use it immediately, store it in the refrigerator for a few days or put it into a freezer bag and freeze it for a later day.

Puntas de Filete – Mexican Beef Tips

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Puntos de Filite - plated

Here is our plated dish. We have some spicy black beans on the left and our puntas de filete on the right.

There is a little Mexican Food restaurant down the street from us that we really love. We started going there years ago when we could walk up and immediately get a seat. Now days, the place is packed and the wait for a table can take an hour to an hour and a half on any night of the week. I’ll admit, we been going there enough and know enough of the staff that we RARELY have to wait that long. Mysteriously, our name usually floats to the top of the list and we get seated pretty quickly!

This restaurant doesn’t prepare much of the run-of-the-mill Tex-Mex and instead focuses on interior Mexican food. This dish is one of our favorites but it was difficult to find a recipe online that really matched the one at our favorite neighborhood restaurant. This is our attempt to combine the different recipes we found online and come up with a suitable homemade version that doesn’t take hours to make. All the recipes we found called for cooking times of 6 to 10 hours, while ours only takes 2 hours total time for prep and cooking.

UPDATE – we started to think this is a little too creamy. Recently, we cut back the Nuefchatel Cheese to 1/2 package and added about 1/4 cup of whole milk instead of the original ingredient of 1 package.

Ingredients

  • 2 pounds of beef tips, cut into 1/2 inch cubes
  • 1 cup roasted corn
  • 4 chipotle peppers finely diced and the sauce from the can
  • 2 teaspoons butter (or vegetable oil)
  • 1 large onion, chopped
  • 3 cloves of garlic, chopped
  • 3 poblano peppers, chopped (you can substitute green peppers)
  • 1 cup sliced mushrooms
  • 1 can of chopped tomatoes
  • 1/2 teaspoon cumin
  • 1/2 can beer (to help tenderize the beef)
  • 1/2 package of Neufchatel Cheese
  • 1/4 cup of whole milk

Directions

Brown the beef tips in a large dutch oven over medium-high heat. As it starts to get completely brown, add in the roasted corn, chipotle peppers and the beer. Turn the heat down to medium and simmer.

Puntos de Filite - beef cooking

In a separate pan, melt the butter over medium-high heat and then add the onion. As the onion starts to soften, add the garlic, cook for 3 or 4 more minutes, then add the poblano peppers and mushrooms. Cook for until the pepper start to get tender, about 3 or 4 minutes.

Puntos de Filite - simmering

Add the onion, garlic, and pepper mixture to the beef in the dutch oven. Mix this all together and then add the tomatoes. Once this is mixed together, cover and simmer for 1 hour to 1 hour & 30 minutes, stirring occasionally. In the last 10 minutes, add in the cheese milk. The cheese gives it a rich, creamy texture and enhances the dish.

We served ours with black beans and some tortillas.

Black Bean Chili

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I’ve been cooking this for years and we love it. I found it in a cookbook that I got for Curt back in 1997. The book is “Cooking with Too Hot Tamales” and I gave it to him for our first Christmas.

Here are the ingredients:

  • 2 cups dried black beans, rinsed, picked over and soaked overnight
  • 6 cups water, or more as needed
  • 1 cup beer (or 1/2 can)
  • 1/4 cup olive oil
  • 2 small red onions, diced
  • coarse salt and freshly ground black pepper to taste
  • 1 green bell pepper, cored, seeded and cut into 1/2-inch cubes
  • 2 ribs celery, coarsely chopped
  • 1 medium carrot, coarsely chopped
  • 2-3 hot peppers diced – jalapeno or serrano peppers are best (if desired)
  • 2 zucchini, diced
  • 1 red bell pepper, cored, seeded and diced
  • 1 yellow bell pepper, cored, seeded and diced
  • 4 large garlic cloves, coarsely chopped
  • 3 tablespoons white wine vinegar
  • 1 small bunch Italian parsley, leaves only, coarsely chopped
  • 1/4 cup Chili Powder mix, recipe follows
  • 1 (12 oz) can diced plum tomatoes
  • 1 cup fresh or thawed frozen corn kernels
  • juice of 1 lemon

There is also a chili powder mix. Just mix these ingredients together and you can adjust this as you prefer:

  • 1 1/2 tablespoons ancho chili powder (or regular chili powder)
  • 1/2 tablespoon ground cumin
  • 1 teaspoons dried oregano, crumbled
  • 1/2 teaspoon ground coriander
  • 1 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper
  • 1 teaspoon coarse salt

There are a lot of things that go into this so take a list with you to the grocery store. I will also admit that you can add or delete ingredients as you see fit. I usually modify this on New Years Day to create a black-eyed pea soup. Also, it’s really helpful if you get all your ingredients ready before you start, otherwise you’ll be rushing to get them all cut and diced before you have to add them to mix.

Here are the general instructions:

First get your beans ready. You can use canned beans but why would you want to do that when beans are so easy to prepare. Follow the instructions on your beans to soak them and get them ready. Once you’ve soaked them, drain the beans and rinse under cold running water. In a large soup pot, combine the beans with the water and bring to a boil, skim off and discard the white scum that rises to the top.

Add the beer and return to a boil. You can use any kind of beer but Shiner is what I prefer. Reduce to a simmer and cook, covered, 45 minutes to 1 hour, until the beans are tender but not falling apart. Keep an eye on the beans and add water if you need to in order to keep the beans covered with water.

When you’re done, drain the beans in a colander and save the cooking liquid for use later.

While the beans are cooking your going to get the vegetables ready. The first part is essentially a sofrito base. To start, heat the olive oil in a large Dutch oven over medium-low heat and then add the red onions and salt and pepper to taste and cook for a couple minutes to get them starting to soften. Once they start to soften, add the garlic, green pepper, celery, carrot and jalapeno peppers and cook about 5 to 8 minutes, stirring occasionally, until these start to soften. Don’t over cook these vegetables because they are going to continue to cook while the mixture simmers. The original recipe has you cook them longer at this stage but the time you’re done, they are all mush, so I prefer to reduce the cooking time and keep the vegetable firmer.

Add the zucchini and red and yellow bell peppers and cook about 8 to 10 minutes longer, until all vegetables are nicely softened.

Now you are going to stir in 4 cups of the reserved bean cooking liquid, the vinegar, half of the parsley and the spice mix and bring to a simmer. Cover and simmer about 30 minutes, stirring occasionally.

Add the drained black beans, tomatoes, corn and lemon juice and cook 15 more minutes. To make it more soupy, add the beans a little earlier so they are softer and start to break down.

Stir in the remaining parsley and serve. You can garnish this with sour cream, scallions and some Monterrey Jack cheese.